The Curiosity rover discovered this rock, smaller than a penny, that resembles a flower or piece of coral inside Gale Crater on February 24. The tiny bits in this photo were made billions of years ago when minerals carried by water cemented the rock.
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NASA’s Curiosity rover used two cameras to take this selfie in front of “Mont Mercou,” a rock formation 20 feet high.
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This hemisphere perspective of Mars’ Valles Marineris, from 9 July 2013, is actually a mosaic of 102 Viking Orbiter images. In the center is the Valles Marineris canyon system, more than 2,000 kilometers long and up to 8 kilometers deep.
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This 2016 self-portrait of the Curiosity Mars rover shows the vehicle at the Quela drilling site in the Murray Buttes area of lower Mount Sharp.
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This photo of a river channel preserved on Mars was taken by an orbiting satellite, with color layers to show the different elevations. Blue is low and yellow is high.
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The European Space Agency’s Mars Express mission captured this 2018 image of the Korolev crater, more than 50 miles away and filled with water ice, near the north pole.
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The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter used a HiRISE camera to get a view of this unusually textured area on the south floor of Gale Crater.
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The cooled lava helps preserve the trail where sand dunes once moved across the southeastern region of Mars. But it also looks like the “Star Trek” symbol.
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Although Mars is not as geologically active as Earth, its surface features have been largely shaped by wind. Wind carving features like these, called yardangs, are common on the red planet. On the sand, the wind forms ripples and small dunes. In Mars’ thin atmosphere, light is not scattered much, so the shadows cast by the field are sharp and dark.
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This small, hematite-rich concrete is near Fram Crater, which was visited by NASA’s Opportunity rover in April 2004. The area shown is 1.2 inches. The view comes from a microscopic imager on Opportunity’s robotic arm, with color information added from the rover’s panoramic camera. These minerals suggest that Mars had a watery past.
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This image shows the seasonal flow in Valles Marineris on Mars, called the repeating slope line, or RSL. These Martian landslides appear on slopes during the spring and summer.
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Mars is known to have dust storms that surround the planet. These 2001 images from NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor orbiter show a dramatic change in the planet’s appearance as the haze created by dust storm activity in the south spreads globally.
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This composite image, looking towards the higher Mount Sharp region, was taken in September 2015 by NASA’s Curiosity rover. In the foreground is a long ridge filled with hematite. Directly opposite is a undulating plain rich in clay minerals. And beyond that there are lots of round buttes, all rich in sulfate minerals. The altered mineralogy in this layer suggests environmental changes on early Mars, although they all involve exposure to water billions of years ago.
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The InSight seismometer recorded a “mars earthquake” for the first time in April 2019.
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From its perch high on a ridge, Opportunity recorded a 2016 image of a Martian dust devil circling through the valley below. The view is seen from the rover trail leading up the north-facing slopes of Knudsen Ridge, which forms part of the southern edge of the Marathon Valley.
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HiRISE captures layered deposits and bright ice sheets at Mars’ north pole.
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Nili Patera is a region on Mars where sand dunes and ripples move rapidly. HiRISE, aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, continues to monitor the area every few months for changes on the seasonal and annual timescales.
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NASA’s Curiosity rover captured the highest-resolution panorama of the Martian surface at the end of 2019. It includes more than 1,000 images and 1.8 billion pixels.
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This image, combining data from two instruments aboard NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor, depicts an orbital view of Mars’ north polar region. The ice-rich polar cap is 621 miles wide, and the dark band within is a deep trough. To the right of center, a large canyon, the Chasma Boreale, almost bisects the ice sheet. The Chasma Boreale is roughly the length of the famous Grand Canyon in the United States and is up to 1.2 miles deep.
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A dramatic fresh impact crater dominates this image taken by a HiRISE camera in November 2013. The crater stretches for about 100 feet and is surrounded by a large explosion zone. Because the terrain in which the crater formed was dusty, the new crater appears blue in the color enhanced image, due to the removal of reddish dust in that area.
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This dark mound, called Ireson Hill, is in the Murray formation at the bottom of Mount Sharp, near the site where NASA’s Curiosity rover examined the linear sandbar in February 2017.
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Is that cake and cream on Mars? No, it’s just a polar dune covered with ice and sand.
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The cloud in the center of this image is actually a dust tower that occurred in 2010 and was captured by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Blue and white clouds are water vapor.
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HiRISE took this image of this one kilometer crater in Mars’ southern hemisphere in June 2014. The crater shows frost on all south-facing slopes in late winter as Mars heads into spring.
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The two largest earthquakes detected by NASA’s InSight appear to have originated in a region of Mars called Cerberus Fossae. Scientists have previously seen signs of tectonic activity here, including landslides. This image was taken by the HiRISE camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
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This image is the first photograph taken from the surface of Mars. It was taken on July 20, 1976, by the Viking 1 lander shortly after landing on the planet.
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